


shaking the wings of her terrible youth

by pinkcupboardwitch



Category: Shades of Magic - V. E. Schwab
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Animal Death, Canonical Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-14
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-23 19:33:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16625117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkcupboardwitch/pseuds/pinkcupboardwitch
Summary: The Dane twins go riding out to war. Neither one comes home again.





	shaking the wings of her terrible youth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Muffinworry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muffinworry/gifts).



> The prompt given was "tall poppies and chariot wheels." The title is adapted from Hozier.

The helmet with its high horsehair crest comes off first. Her boots next, covered in dew, blood, and crushed petals. Above her head, the tent canvas creaks like snapping reins.

Their _Antari_ \- Astrid fumbles with the thought a moment - stands watching quietly. The new link between them aches like a half-healed wound. The rest of the army is like a distant ocean in her mind: present, yet still bearable. Soulless as they are, they are so still when she ignores them that it is near restful. But she cannot get away from Holland’s heartbeat, doubled loud alongside hers in her skull. She cannot get away from each quiet breath, in and out of his lungs; from the careful tension in his shoulders; from the sheen of sweat on his back and under his arms.

“My lady, are you well?”

She realizes she’s rubbing her temple. She drops her hand. “How does Athos bear it?” Again that slip. Holland’s face remains as impassive as ever.

His heartbeat doesn’t change; she feels rather than sees him swallow when she looks at him. He won’t be afraid of her until he has reason to be, but he’s wary. Always so wary: that coiled strength and that pressure in his jaw. She starts to understand why Athos had complained of sleep loss and headaches.

Astrid presses her fist to her side and breathes in deep through her nose. Tomorrow. Tomorrow the fight. All she has to do is focus on that.

“My lady?” A pause. Then, very carefully, “Are you afraid, my lady?”

She answers mechanically, “Can I be afraid now, when my brother is dead?”

-

In place of a coup, they’d had a war. Their first plan had worked well. The Maresh _Antari_ had handed over the stone with perfect trust: she’d held it in her hand and it had torn the doors open.

Too well. That backlash of pure energy had knocked out of her stolen body. She’d woken up in her own form, Holland carrying her out to the courtyard, Athos almost dancing beside them with joy. In the meantime, Kell had raised the alarm, and the three of them with their army spill out onto the poppy fields of Red London to find the Maresh army waiting.

Day chases day under that foreign autumn sun. The Red army remains entrenched before its walls, armor gleaming, banners red as the poppies they wade through. They fight off another knot of White soldiers moving in too-perfect unison, and a ragged cheer goes up.

Then black energy crackles. Lightning plunges: not from the cloudless sky, but from five white fingers. The two war chariots sweep through in another arc: horsehair helmets waving, reins and wheels snapping. The twins’ high shouts fill the air as they urge their horses on. Men die. Horses scream.

Astrid Dane, sword in hand, throws back her head and laughs.

Almost she could be glad to die here. She has seen the Red river in daylight; she has felt its power in her veins. The very air here is richer. What wonders they’ve wreaked already. They could ride on forever, she and Athos, into the halls of the blessed.

Because the tide is turning against them. They may have the black stone and years of cunning between them, but Red London’s forces are better-armed, better-trained, better-fed. They are two magicians; Red London has scores. Their soulless soldiers do not know how to feel fear or pain, do not know how to retreat unless bidden. So they fight on, and are cut down where they stand.

Astrid scans the field for Athos and sees no sign, then takes another killing sweep through the Red London forces. The sun beats down hot on her nape. Her arm aches from the constant rise and fall of bringing down her sword. She feels so alive. Almost, almost, she could be glad to die.

When at last she spots Athos through the fray, sight comes first. Understanding comes second and too late.

A wide circle of corpses and bare ground. Holland pacing the perimeter to keep the rest at bay. Athos, bareheaded, his hair unbound over his shoulders, _Antari_ blood streaking both cheeks. He stands with one foot upon an enemy spear.

“ _Manes_!” he cries in a voice that cracks on a scream. “ _Manes laresque_!”

The language of old London. An invocation calling on the spirits of the dead. Victory in exchange for a sacrifice. “No,” Astrid gasps, and lashes her horses into a gallop.

She cannot understand all the words; she never paid much heed to dead languages. But she hears _protect_ and _my city_ , and then _protect my sister._ She hears _I dedicate myself with the enemy dead_ …

She is still two hundred feet away when Athos vaults back into the chariot, his face shining with a terrible light.

“Athos!” she shrieks. “ _Athos_!”

He looks back.

For a moment, that light fades: he only smiles at her. Gods, so much love in that smile. Fear too. Like a scared boy.

Then he turns away again, clicks his tongue, and touches his whip to his white horses. They leap forward. On the wind, she hears him roar like a lion as he crashes through the enemy lines. But she’s always been the better rider, she can still catch him, she can help him –

Then the army turns against her. Step by step, inch by inch, a wall of dead-eyed bodies, they push her back from the front lines. Astrid slashes with her whip at the first few of them, then seizes the reins in both hands and tries to trample through. But the bodies that pile up only clog the wheels of her chariot, and still more of them press her back.

She’s not even looking at them anymore. Her eyes, all of her senses, are fixed on that bright distant figure cutting a swathe through the enemy troops. She cannot see his face. She cannot hear him singing his death song.

But she feels the moment that her own troops suddenly part for her, the moment that every bond and ward in the army snaps over to her control. Holland’s mind flashes across hers incredulously, shocking and intimate as a lover’s palm on her belly; she feels his hand fly unbidden to the brand over his heart. Her own sternum comes ablaze in ice and fire.

Astrid reins her horses up, sinks to her knees in the chariot, and screams and screams and screams.

**-**

In the end, it had taken almost a dozen arrows to kill him. One had gone into his eye. The ruin left when she takes it out, with his black blood welling to fill the hollow, looks as dark as an _Antari_ eye.

Astrid cries and cries. Then she wipes her nose on her hand and keeps tugging at arrows.

The back of his head is a horror of blood and shattered bone. He’d gotten tangled in the reins somehow when he fell, and the horses had dragged him almost a mile before they circled back to their companions in camp. She prays that he’d already been dead when he hit the ground.

There are remnants of shredded poppies in his hair. Those she leaves.

The Red forces are leaving them alone for a night to hold his funeral, in some vague notion of honor. Holland had received the messenger – _received_ being a vague term. He’d stood on their side of the moat while the messenger stood on the other and shouted at him.

They need time to bury their dead too. Whether it was the _Manes_ greedy for more dead or his own desperate hope, Athos had killed far more than a single mortal man should have been able to. She’d seen the heaps of corpses in the distance. No royal funeral for _them_ : they’ll need to stack that lot four corpses deep in order to fit them all into the same grave. Her lips twitch bitterly. Red London won’t soon forget Athos.

“Ready,” Holland says tonelessly behind her.

“Don’t look so fucking happy,” she snaps. Turning her head, she glares up from her crouch. Holland only blinks down at her.

He stays quiet like that with his head down for the rest of the funeral. Even when he helps her sacrifice Athos’s horses at the pyre, he doesn’t look up. They’d blindfolded the horses first with Athos’s shirts to have his scent calm them. “Shh, shh,” she whispers to the softly whickering horse she has in hand. “Shh, pretty one, brave one, go ride with your lord.”

She doesn’t know if Holland murmurs anything to his horse. She only sees his knife start to move and moves her own faster, so that the horses will not smell blood and be afraid.

Then the dragging of their velvety corpses up onto the pyre beside Athos, and the dousing of the wood with oil. The slash across her palm to drip blood onto his eyes and lips, before she sets the fire herself. Kings in her London so rarely get funerals: more often they are thrown to the crows and dogs. But her Athos has ever been a marvel.

Higher, higher, the flames turn the night bright and hot as bloodlust. The army at her back is massed and still. She could make them walk into the fire one by one; she could make their shadow-quiet _Antari_ walk in too. It’s still not enough. Athos had died to give her victory: he’d trusted her.

But she’s not Athos. He’d always been the dreamer, the one who came up with ideas, while she came up with the plan. She doesn’t have the control to puppeteer every soldier in their army and still be focused enough to fight. What she has is her own lean fighter’s body. Her own breed of trickery.

She had started to shake; now she grows still. Her fist clenches shut.

She feels Holland lift his head and stare at her, black-green eyes unreadable.

Astrid wheels about and stalks for the Red city. Without slowing, she throws off her helmet and shakes her hair loose so that it glints in the moonlight like a wave of silver. There is no mistaking her now.

Someone barks an order above the gate as she near their lines. Steel glints and fire blooms on the wall: every crossbow and fire magician is leveled at her.

Astrid walks faster. She stops at the end of the bridge.

“KING!” she shouts. “False king! All you ever did to earn your throne was crawl out from between your mother’s thighs! Come on then!” Her blood is roaring in her ears like the storm of her brother’s last charge. “Come face me! Fight for your throne like a real king should!”

A tall man in gleaming crimson armor pushes to the front of the crowd. A narrow crown sits on his curly hair. “I gave you time and dignity for your brother’s rites,” Maresh calls down to her. “Is this how you show your gratitude?”

“A lioness is not grateful to sheep that get out of her way,” she retorts. “I offer you a challenge, _flower king_. If you won’t fight for your own honor, fight for your son’s.” She smiles. “I’ve worn his skin, after all.”

Someone makes a choked sound behind Maresh; Astrid glimpses a shock of red hair. “Let me -,” Kell starts to Maresh, but the older man shakes his head. Rings glint in the moonlight as his hand tightens on the hilt of his sword.

“I suppose even a barbarian would understand the importance of family?” he asks coldly.

Victory.

Astrid's smile now is even more mirthless than the first. “Oh, yes. We do.”

-

Noon. The two armies watching. The two _Antari_ waiting. The two fighters circling each other.

Now this Maxim is a thing wholly different from his sons. Holland has told her how he was called the Steel Prince in his youth. As a young man, he had grown lean and strong in ship battles. Maxim is brave, Maxim is skilled, Maxim is fighting for his home and family. He is a good general, a good soldier.

Astrid has been killing since she was eight years old.

When at last he falls, blood gushing from his mouth and a half dozen wounds, a cry goes up from the city. Astrid wipes the grime off her face, strides over, and rolls him onto his back with her foot; he groans faintly. Still alive. Good.

She turns to Holland. “Fetch me a pair of ropes.”

Someone is cursing her, high on the walls, as she lashes Maresh by the ankles to her chariot: a high thin youth’s voice, cracked with grief, suddenly so much like a boy’s. Astrid registers it from a very great distance. The sun beating down on her, her hands tying the knots: all these seem distant too. Athos riding away from her, Athos’s bright form dragged by fleeing horses through the poppies and rubble – these alone are not distant.

She springs into the chariot. She clicks the horses into a trot. Slow at first, slow, slow. Let him scream first.

Maresh lasts a surprisingly long time in silence: she starts to think he's died. Then they hit a patch of gravel, twenty feet at least, and at last he screams. Screams, and then screams again.

_My brother died singing. You will die like a rabbit dragged to death. Some king._

Screams and choked screams behind her and a long trail of crimson in her wake. She spurs the horses on, faster, until the wind roars in her ears. As though she could outride death and catch that bright figure vanishing.

He is their family. He is dying; he is almost dead. What would you do to stretch that _almost_ out forever? What would anyone do?

_Everything, everything. Kill or die for them. Burn the city and salt the fields. Light the fire, light the pyre; bring them home._

He is family.

Astrid wheels against the wind and shouts up at the walls, “He is your father, your king! Come take him back!”

_What would anyone do?_

When those iron gates open of their own will, the war already lost from within, no one is surprised.

In a disorganized mass the Red army spills through: magicians and foot soldiers, maybe even princes and a queen in their midst. But they are choked by their own numbers and grief; they clog up the gate. And the White army is ready and waiting, and the White army has no soul with which to grieve.

She gives them one command. “Kill everyone who isn’t us.” Then she turns them loose.

As she gallops to the head of the storm, she catches sight of Holland loping through the fray, a long knife in his hand and his red mouth panting. He’s lost all sign of the soft-spoken _Antari_ who watches wordlessly at executions and then drinks to blot it out. This one crouches low, moving like a wolf, and his face is drawn and streaked with ash. She whistles, he looks up, she grabs his wrist and he springs up into the chariot, shaking his head as though to clear it.

“Can you drive?” she asks.

“ _No_.”

She huffs a laugh. “Watch my blind spots then. Don’t fall off.”

She starts to quicken the horses back into a gallop. Holland stoops, hooking his hand in her belt to steady himself, and saws through the ropes binding Maxim’s body behind them. The corpse rolls free; he straightens, returning her sharp look with raised eyebrows.

Then they are inside the city.

Massacre. Blood and ash, fire and screams. It smells like home. Holland straightens beside her, his eyes going distant and far away inside himself the way they always do when told to kill. He slashes; ice decapitates a Red guard lunging for the chariot.

For a moment they look at each other, across the chariot, across the bond. His eyes are not lost at all. She can feel his blood roaring hot and fast inside his skull at the kill. Her leashed beast, given the permission he craves. He would have been a murderer either way if he’d never met them. But they’ve taught him _joy_.

She knows it and he knows it and he hates it and she glories in it. Astrid’s grin stretches into a snarl, into a scream. She lashes the horses on.

-

Later, after the sack, Astrid listens dispassionately as the reports file in. No sign of the remaining Mareshes, either among the dead or the new slaves. She gives orders for hunts and patrols, but in a way she’s glad. So long as they live, the war can go on. She knows what to do in war.

Hunt for the royals. Sort and carry off the treasure. Dump the dead in the river. Then she orders the poppy fields burned.

No king, no man, has ever equaled Athos. No funeral will ever equal his either. She doesn’t know the spot where he fell, so now all the fields will be consecrated by fire in his name. Other kings slink into death with only their gnawed bones to show. Her brother will come riding with a train of a million scarlet poppies.

Astrid and Holland stand watching in the middle of it: Holland with his arms folded, Astrid with her hands clasped on the pommel of her sword. The heat makes their vision waver; the wind from the fire whips their hair. Embers singe holes in their clothes. Field mice and grass snakes scurry away in terror, or scream as they burn in their burrows.

Already she is used and not used to Holland’s heartbeat doubled with hers, closer than she had ever been with Athos. No - there had been her mother’s womb. Astrid smiles bitterly. To be twin-born again so late in life, on a battlefield in a foreign world: to lose her true twin and gain this one. Even dead gods still enjoy their jokes.

A flock of birds takes panicked flight, wings and tails burning. Their shrilling fills the air. Holland says something: his voice is too soft to hear over the roar of flames and burning flowers. She swivels her head and stares at him.

“What now?” he repeats.

After a moment, Astrid shrugs. “Keep killing,” she says. “Keep fighting. Spend a summer or two to settle things here and learn their magic, then march on the next London.” She chuckles thinly as he darts a quick look at her. “Astrid Dane, empress of all Londons. It sounds good, doesn’t it?”

He doesn’t answer for a long space. She can feel his eyes on her: watchful, calculating. Unreadable. Nothing of the joyous, horrified man who had ridden with her into a guttering city. _One day,_ she thinks distantly, _one day maybe I’ll blind you._

“Empress sounds good, doesn’t it?” she repeats.

“And afterwards?” he asks quietly.

 She shrugs again.

**Author's Note:**

> Athos's ritual is based on the Roman rite of devotio.


End file.
